The Vault by Ruth Rendell Page B

said?
    Naturally, the first remark Tom Ede made to him was to ask about Sylvia, and he seemed delighted when Wexford said she was recovering and would be out of hospital in two days’time. Nothing was said about prayers and Tom quickly reverted to the Orcadia Cottage case.
    ‘I’d like to ask you,’ he began, ‘how important you think the name “Francine” is. I mean, do we need to try and trace every Francine in the country? The trouble with that is that so many people who were young twelve years ago have left the country, just as others have come in. If she exists – and we don’t know that she does or ever did – she may be anywhere.’
    ‘Perhaps we have to ask ourselves why he would write the name Francine on a piece of paper on which
“La Punaise”
and what is almost certainly a pin number were already written. Because this woman with a French-sounding name could translate for him what was obviously a French word? It looks like it. So she must have been someone close to him. You don’t ask a casual acquaintance or a person much older than you to translate something which obviously has a criminal connection.’
    ‘He might have just asked her to translate “La Punaise” and not mentioned the number.’
    ‘True. But wouldn’t the meaning suggest a pin number to her? At least wouldn’t she question him?’
    ‘I don’t know, Reg. Maybe she did question him. Can we construct some sort of scenario out of what we do know?’
    ‘The way I see it, the young man who called himself Keith Hill somehow got into Orcadia Cottage and perhaps even lived there with a French girl called Francine. He found the address book with the pin number and “La Punaise” made to look like a restaurant, intending to use it to rob Harriet Merton’s account.’
    ‘If he was living there, where were Franklin Merton and Harriet? They can’t have been there, because it must have been at this time that the pseudonymous Keith Hill removed the door to the cellar, bricked up the doorway and plastered over it. Incidentally, why would he do that?’
    ‘It has to be because he’d killed Harriet and maybe that cousin of his or whoever it was and was sealing them up in a tomb.’
    ‘But he was in there, too,’ Tom objected.
    ‘I know there are holes in my scenario. I think we have to see Anthea Gardner again, see if we can find out where Franklin Merton may have been at that time, whenever that time was, and maybe see Mildred Jones first to try and settle this time question. So far all we know is that it was about twelve years ago.’
    Mildred Jones was in a better frame of mind than when last seen. Some women are very much affected, Wexford thought, by whether they think they are looking good or are dissatisfied with their appearance or are having, for instance, a ‘bad hair day’, while men are influenced by the state of their car – he thought of that Edsel – or a bad back or a cold coming on. Mildred Jones’s hair had evidently just been done and silver streaks put among the iron grey. The red dress she wore suited her better than the trouser suit, which dwarfed her. Wexford supposed she was aware of these things, a feeling confirmed when she glanced with satisfaction into a mirror on their way to the chintzy living room.
    ‘You want me to tell you when I saw the so-called Mr Hill and his fancy car, do you? I’ll have to think.’ She was silent for a moment. Then she said. ‘When I try to remember when something or other happened I have to try and think of the weather. I mean, if it was summer or winter and raining or whatever.’
    Tom was nodding encouragingly.
    ‘It’s no good nodding at me like that.’ A flash of the old acerbity was showing itself. ‘That won’t help me. I’m thinking. Ah,’ she said. ‘I know now. It must have been autumn. The whole place was covered with leaves – no, it wasn’t, notcovered. That came a week or two later. The leaves from that Virginia creeper were beginning to fall. It